Watching television coverage of Bradford City beating Aston Villa on Tuesday
night, I was struck by the most arresting sight.

As the visitors’ Barry Bannan went to take a corner, he was assailed by an overexcited Bradford fan, attempting verbally to put him off his stride.

Perhaps a choice observation was being made about his height, maybe about his hair’s copper hue, whatever it was probably as well that the pitchside microphones did not pick it up.

Not that there was anything unusual in such behaviour: most fans reckon that the price of entry to a football game these days includes the right loudly to voice disparaging comment about opposition players.

What was striking, though, was the identity of the fan yelling at Bannan: she was an Asian woman wearing a hijab. What is more, she was with a couple of female Asian friends, in a section of the Valley Parade crowd dotted with Asian faces.

If it is possible that someone yelling at a footballer represents evidence of social progress, then this was the most encouraging image of the season.

After all the miserable racist vituperation that has swilled around football recently, here was a Muslim woman, comfortable in the middle of an ethnically mixed crowd, engaging with the game’s traditional possibilities. And in doing so, clearly having the time of her life. How pleasant was that to see?

The good news is that shouty Bradford woman is not alone. For years it was to the game’s shame that Asian people felt excluded from immersing themselves in its glories.

Such was the sense of isolation, British Asian men largely preferred to follow cricket, while young Asian females would never have felt comfortable at a match.

Thanks to some imaginative initiatives, parts of the game are increasingly reaching out to the Asian audience. Which, if nothing else, makes commercial sense: this is a substantial inner-city market residing in the shadow of league grounds. To ignore it is to miss out on the customers living on the doorstep.

And the Asians are coming. At Manchester United home games, television audiences have for several years now seen a family of Sikhs doughnutting the dugout, passing each other sweets as Sir Alex Ferguson stalks the technical area.

At Wolverhampton Wanderers, the growth in interest among the city’s Asians has been growing rapidly since 2007, when a group of six fans formed Punjabi Wolves.

“We just thought: the game belongs to us as much as anybody,” Raj Bains, the organisation’s founder, explains. “I started going to matches in 1979. In the early days it was a bit scary, even with the home fans. But there are no issues now.”

Within five years, the organisation has grown to the point it now has more than 800 members. At home matches, they sit in different parts of Molineux. But at away matches the Punjabi Wolves are a noticeable, unified presence, travelling together, sitting together, banging their Indian drums as they approach grounds.

“The drums give us our identity,” says Bains. “But we consider ourselves very much part of the Wolves family.”

Bains has been approached by officials from West Bromwich, Aston Villa and Birmingham City all seeking his advice on starting similar groups.

But he is too busy building Punjabi Wolves to franchise the idea yet. Established as a charity, from the off the group has collected money for good causes.

Last summer, Bains led a party out to India to help in the construction of a housing project they had helped to finance.

“Eight Asian and two English lads went,” he says. “Which was a reflection of our membership. We’re open to anyone: Asian, black, white. The only entry requirement is you love Wolves.” All ages, too. One of Punjabi Wolves’ regular drummers is 13. Which in itself is noteworthy.

Indeed what was perhaps more telling about the Valley Parade ranter was not so much her ethnicity as her age. She was clearly under 20. With her satchel slung round her neck, she looked like she was a student.

And the young really are an endangered species in the game’s upper reaches. In the Premier League the crowds are ageing faster than Paul Lambert as he watched his defenders flail and fail on Tuesday.

Scan the stands during any top flight match and the hairlines are receding, the faces lined, the average age way over 45. The clubs are doing little to address that ageing demographic.

At the Emirates on Sunday, Arsenal are charging visiting Manchester City fans £62 a head, perhaps on the assumption that they all come from Abu Dhabi. There will not be many students in that crowd. Unless their dad has paid.

Down the divisions it is not like that. At Milton Keynes, for instance, the Dons are watched by a crowd markedly younger than that at any Premier League venue. The main stand is packed with families, while gaggles of youths gather in the Stadium MK’s Cow Shed stand, chanting encouragement to their team.

Which is perhaps no surprise: half-season tickets, taking in the rest of the Dons’ League One home campaign, are available to under-18s for £20. That is not per game, that is for all 10 remaining matches, the kind of price affordable for even those whose paper round wages have stubbornly refused to rise in line with inflation.

It is the same at Bradford. Even as the club sank through the divisions, a conscientious effort to maintain crowd levels has seen prices held down.

Assuming she flashed her student card, the Asian woman ranter would have paid only £14 on Tuesday night to watch a riveting cup semi final. After what she experienced there is every chance she will be coming back.

It may be the product of necessity – in Bradford’s case maybe even of desperation – but what such a policy has done is mark out a new and different course for football.

While the Premier League plays out to an ever more affluent, ever ageing, white audience that will eventually, inevitably, die off, clubs like Bradford have found the path to renewal.

In fact, it could be said that what I was looking at when I saw that young Bantams fan in the hijab was this: football’s future.